What the water & moongave me is 20 poems about exactly that; how the moon and different bodies of water have inspired my work since moving to South Australia. And I only discovered this after one of Bill Greenwell’s Poetry Clinics last year, when I realised that the majority of poems I had submitted for feedback either featured the moon or sea. So I delved into my archives, found similar themed poems, edited, developed a few more and voila!

Once again Stephen and Brenda Matthews at Ginninderra Press have done a fantastic job of pulling this together, and in a short space of time too. They make a brilliant team and I feel very proud to be part of the GP family. And I’m rather pleased with how the cover has turned out too. This was a photo I took during our last trip to Robe, which captures the beauty of both rather well I think.

So if you fancy reading some poems about the moon and water (sometimes both), head on over to Ginninderra Press or alternatively, let me know and I can organise a copy for you.

After finishing Catherine Smith’s online feedback course earlier in the year through The Poetry School and finding it extremely useful, I thought it about time I enroll on another to give life to some poems that just want to sleep and do nothing all day. So I did.

I had heard good things about Bill Greenwell’s poetry clinic and discovered his work through Abegail Morley, an extraordinarily talented poet who Bill used to mentor. The course runs over 10 weeks and is hosted through an online learning environment out of Exeter University, with the absence of ‘live’ sessions suiting me perfectly due to the time difference.

The aim is simple – to share poems with other poets and an experienced and published tutor, cue Bill, for discussion and critique. So the idea is to present a poem a week, or two if time and length permits, and now half way through the course I have five poems to work on using invaluable feedback.

And even if widely published before, I believe a poet should never stop improving, learning and sharing to develop themselves, their work and fellow poets. Thus I’m in brilliant company, joined by the likes of Sharon Black and Valerie Morton, two poets with excellent track records, as well as solo collections.

So with that in mind I best get back to it. Stop blogging, making cups of tea, thinking about lunch…